


a prayer in a burning church

by cloudedhues



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Canon Compliant, Explicit Language, F/M, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, no smut tho sorry :(
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 10:48:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10717896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudedhues/pseuds/cloudedhues
Summary: The problem isn’t that Cullen doesn't believe in fate.It's that he does.AU where the first thing your soulmate says to you is written on your palm.





	a prayer in a burning church

 

“I hope they’re right about you."

The words are purely instinct, like he’s not really thinking about what leaves his mouth. Which is of course why the change in her expression is foreign to him. They are in the breath of battle, tethered between one word and the next in wait for the storm to return. His head is already with his men bleeding in another field.

“You’re not the only one hoping that,” she says, and the world feels like it should change right there.

(Of course it doesn’t. But that's relative.)

"We'll see soon enough, won't we?"

He walks away and three minutes later, there's a twinge at the back of his hand. A phantom pain but not, like a feeling of loss recently returned. But by the time his head has whipped around to catch sight of the prisoner, the fog of the Frostbacks have descended once more without preamble.

He stands there like an idiot for a few more seconds before he sucks in a breath and drags his focus to the next fight, feet heavy and plodding with each step in the drifts.

 _Worry later, you fool_ , he tells himself when he barely misses the swipe of a claw meant for his head. _Make sure there’s even a later first._

 

 

 

 

 

 

They appeared after his fourth nameday.

The words were illegible, a mess of strokes tangled together. Over time, it warped itself into neater lines as if the crooked _t_ 's and the slanted _h_ 's had been beaten and straightened out into discipline. But even then, there was a wildness that stayed. A refusal to conform as if the letters were just biding time before they broke free.

No one knew how changes like this happened. They were much like the same with the rest of the mysteries in the world. Magic. The Fade. The Maker.

One thing was certain: there were no shortage of opinions.

Growing up in a town blanketed with Chantry influence, there were countless different theories about the Prophet's hand making their rounds. Some claimed her for the Maker. A romantic and heretic few kept that it had been her elvhen companion, Shartan. The rest held that it had been her betrayer, a final twist from the knife that had rooted Andraste into mortal soil. To think of Maferath living immortal in her hand was not a thought most believers could bear to say aloud.

Cullen does not know which to believe. Then again, it is not as if it matters.

When he arrives at Kinloch Hold, his bare hand is given a glove and a sword. He would stretch his hand, see how the leather folded and creased every time he made a fist or gripped his sword from its scabbard. It was a repeated lesson, a well-worn prayer. A Templar has no use for words when he's sworn to action. The only words a Templar needs belong to the oath he’s made.

Even when that time festered away in his mind, that truth had stayed.

Cullen blames himself for many things, but when he hears those words again, he really can’t blame himself for forgetting.

She could be any ordinary woman. A woman he could pass by in the streets of Kirkwall, a woman who could have lived in the town he grew up in, a woman selling wares at the marketplace. These possibilities made more sense to him than the actual reality, but even still, he has to remind himself to look her in the eye when he sees her again.

Cassandra doles out the introductions and Cullen's words are level. Being professional is easy. He's done professional more than any other cloak in his life. There's no need to broach anything past what's within reach.

She is distant, if not bewildered, and a little glib when they talk about the Chantry but she seems to mean what she says. When she leaves, he finds it’s much simpler for his mind to return to normalcy than expected. Of course it's easy to avoid her when she’s not there in the first place, especially with the Hinterlands laying claim on her for a month. Cassandra’s missives ease his anxieties well enough for him to focus supervising his recruits. Which is where she finally corners him when she returns.

He's not surprised. From what he's gathered, she has a strange knack of checking in and managing an hour-long conversation into ten minutes with just about everyone.

Even more, he's singled out her presence before she's opened the gates. The hairs at the back of his arm rise with every step, an unfortunate side effect it seems of having to carry her words around.

But it's a non-issue. If anything, it just makes him more prepared.

She asks something or other about the current state of the war and the Order and he answers a best he can, directing his attention from his soldiers to her, taut with a restless kind of energy. Surely, even she must see the urgency in their directives and the possibilities to do lasting good in their positions. It is only when he sees her surprised smile of amusement that he stills himself.

“I’m sorry. I know you didn’t come here for a lecture,” he says, embarrassed that his tongue has once again carried him farther than he can follow.

“Well, if you’ve got one, I’d be happy to listen.”

Her mouth quirks again, one corner higher than the other. She’s teasing him for certain, but it is not cruel. Rather she smiles as if she is inviting him to join her in a joke she'll share with no one else. Against his will, he finds himself growing self-conscious of his hands.

A messenger intercepts him then and he is almost grateful to have work to hold onto.

"As I was saying," he tells her.

 _Gloves back on_ , he tells himself.

 

 

 

 

 

The first rule he’s learned in combat is to know your opponent.

Awareness is needed to make a judgment call, to fly or to fight. To attack or defend. It's not like he thinks of her as the enemy but there's a great many reasons why being strategic where she's concerned is the safest bet.

She poses no real harm to them all apart from her intentions, or at least the lack of their apparency. Leliana’s report on her spans the entire makeshift desk in his tent and it is as innocuous as any mage hailing from a Circle with a reputation of moderateness. She does not share the same ambition as the rest of the Inquisition do in stitching the tears of the world. Her drive seems circumstantial and incidental, her smile to people who call her Herald benign and non-threatening. It occurs to him that apart from the words on his hand and his unexplainable ability to sense even her tiniest exhale from across the room, he does not know her at all.

 _Strategy_ , he thinks.

When Varric invites him for a game of cards, he is surprised but acquiesces, albeit reluctantly.

Most of the Herald’s Inner Circle is stationed around a table in one of the Chantry rooms, and with a little worry, he can see even Josephine at the far end of the table.

“What am I doing here, Varric, and why do I get the sense that you're all about to ambush me?”

“I’d like to think we’d be nice enough to give you a little warning beforehand,” Bull notes with some amusement.

“Call it a favor. I know your tent is nice and all but you do know you have to breathe every now and then?” Varric says, starting to shuffle the cards in a speed that has Cullen suddenly wary of his pockets.

Sera adds in a joking snort. “If it makes you feel any better, I told them not to invite you.”

Before he can conspire to leave, the Herald is already by the doorway like some preordained force come specifically to block his path.

“Well, wouldn’t you know. I’d wagered you'd be worn down to joining these miscreants eventually, Commander.”

He points a glance at Varric but the dwarf is too good at slipping off the credit of his own handiwork.

“Herald,” Varric says amiably, his hands still flying. “Didn't know if you’d be up for a round, but since you're here, you want to invite yourself in?”

As answer, she pulls up a chair right next to Cullen.

“I hope you're all prepared to lose,” she says, and there’s a determination there that rivals the look she wears in battle.

Already ahead of you, Cullen thinks. He takes his cards, his posture very still like a man waiting for his sentence. When he passes her own set from Varric, he takes care not to touch her directly.

He keeps vigilance to be careful but he finds himself growing calmer than he expects as the night wanes. Some hazy part of him can credit the mead for loosening his limbs. He shares an old story from his Kirkwall days before “the shit hit the fan” as Varric states, garnering some curious questions from the rest. And even one from her. She has an uncanny ability to listen to anything someone says as if each word matters. Cullen doesn't know whether to be flattered or unnerved.

During a lull in the game, she starts competing with the rest to tell the most ridiculous tale they know. She laughs now, unabashed as Sera regales them all with an absurdly lascivious story about bottoms and whatnot. Seemingly without meaning to, she leans back onto Cullen’s side as she tries to keep her balance from laughing too hard. His heart jumps painfully, anxiety ratcheting up and it is only training and years of experience that he maintains a facade of composure.

Surely, she must not know her physical effect on him. Especially since this is the first time she's ever made direct contact.

Thankfully, no one’s caught on and Cullen wills himself to relax again. When his gaze sweeps back to her, he’s realized that she’s said something. He coughs, regaining his wits.

“Sorry. I didn’t catch that.”

“I’ve heard from Bull and Solas that you play chess. I’ve dabbled a bit in my time at the Circle. Maybe we can play some time together?”

She even smiles in that specific way of hers, and it's not even an issue but he finds his vocabulary predictably useless.

So he nods painfully, lying so she’ll stop putting so much of her attention on him. To his right, Varric is pretending not to look amused as he reshuffles.

“Anyone up for a new round?”

Josephine hums noncommittally even if her gleeful smile says otherwise. Bull grabs his cards. The Herald says, “I am if Cullen is.”

She gives him a friendly nudge with her elbow, and like a wisp of air, the tension in his shoulders taper into nothing but a reminder.

_Keep your control. There's no need to take out your issues to be scrutinized. What good has that done to you before? What good have you done to anyone before?_

The song is starting again. He can feel his head throbbing with its beat.

“Hey. Are you alright?”

Her voice is low, the volume just audible enough for only him to hear.

He clears his throat. “I'm fine, Your Worship. I might have drunk more than I bargained for. But it's nothing I can't handle.”

She gives him a disbelieving look but gratefully concedes.

“If you say so. Still, if you need to leave, I can cover for you.”

“Thank you.”

“Really, you can ask at least that much.”

“Of course.”

She gives him another friendly nod before finally letting him go and this time, he regrets the easy lie all the more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

His dreams are terrible but at the very least, they’re familiar. But this is new. Or rather, it's new again.

There is no making sense of dreamscapes but this one in particular feels tangible, tactile and solid under his fingertips. Even the air tastes nostalgic. The scene is familiar: a stranger is on their doorstep asking for his mother. He is well-dressed, every bit higher in appearance than their usual visitor apart from the sickly sheen on his forehead.

The stranger coughs into a handkerchief before he asks, a smudge of red appearing at the corner of his lip.

Before he can say much of anything else, his mother appears.

_Cullen, who is it?_

All of a sudden, he is pushed behind a locked door, having to press his ear against the wood with only the stranger’s cracking pleas and his mother’s soft but firm denials as his understanding.

 _No_ , she finishes. _I can’t go with you._

Then he hears the door shut and his mother is already next to him with a smile and a promised murmur that the stranger had been nothing to worry about at all. Even in this dream, he doesn’t miss the fact that she’s lying. Nor can he overlook the expression on her face when she stares at her palm, plain ring sitting above it as if she’s forgotten it’s been there all along.

The scene drifts and blurs as dreams do and he finds himself next to her doubled over in pain on his parents’ bed with his father and siblings hovering over her worriedly. Her eyes are screwed shut, hand curled like a knot to her chest, all the air in the world crushing and pushing her open and she opens her eyes with a snap, her irises black and swirling and locked on his.

He can’t even brace at the sound before he wakes, wisps of his nightmare dissolving in the cold air of the Frostbacks. His breathing peters into uneven beats and he holds firm to the sides of his cot to ground himself. Ritual. Easy. He’s done this before. Still, Cullen can’t shake the thought that his bones must be stained with such a sound. His dreams are always terrible, but they always hold some truth.

In reality, there had been no mention of that night his mother screamed with death, neither in passing nor by accident. Not when he had overheard a group of women murmuring about the tragic passing of a noble's ailing son the next town over.

Not even when his father had died a year after and his mother could only draw the black veil tighter around herself to prove she felt anything at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If there’s anything simple about her he can latch onto, it’s how different she is from him.

Through long, dragging War Table meetings enlivened only by the light of Josephine’s stuttering candles, he categorizes her as an intelligent and well-read scholar. Much like what he’d expect from a top mage raised in the Circle. But in the field reports, she is foolhardy, a wild card driven by impulse rather than strategy. Cullen’s pragmatism is a thorn to her sentimentality. Her entitlement a prick to his discipline. Still, they’ve always discussed their disagreements with barely a rise in volume.

But this is different.

It isn’t as if it had never occurred to him that he had been a Templar and she a Circle Mage. In fact, sometimes that is the only thing that made sense between them. When she decides to go to Redcliffe, her raised voice dropping to an air of finality, Cullen can’t help the bitterness in his mouth.

“At least, you’ve made whom you favor clear,” he says, arms crossed and his hands blistering in his gloves.

“It’s not as if this is a game, Commander.”

“No. But with how you treat it, you could have fooled me.”

“Well. Pity that I fooled myself as well into thinking a Templar could finally overcome his prejudices.”

She leaves then, eyes cool with a turn of her heel. While her anger lingers, all Cullen can feel in the static of his arms is her hurt and disappointment. Leliana, Josephine and Cassandra had left hours ago but the room still feels disapprovingly stifling.

She is gone for the Hinterlands the following morning before they can speak again and the days go by as days do. He returns to work, the swing of familiarity and routine readjusting him back to expectations. Circle peg to circle hollow.

Until his hand flinches.

It is only for a short time and he can’t begin to say how long it lasts. One minute he is himself and the next he is not, as if he has been replaced by a stranger who looks and thinks exactly like him. He doesn’t know how he knows that she’s been gone. There is not even a pain. Nor a feeling of loss. Just simply the experience of never having had something in the first place. The world had rearranged itself when he wasn’t looking, made red green, inverted light to dark.

A brief existence of a feeling.

It is enough to bring him to his knees.

When she comes back, he gives both of them a day before he approaches her at the back of the Chantry. She is alone, a rare enough occurrence that he feels almost criminal disrupting. She doesn’t turn her head at all when he stands just right by her shoulder as they both stare at the cracked effigy of Andraste, her hands open in supplication to the Maker. It is old, faded but there is a beauty in its cracks and fissures.

“I’m curious - what do you believe was in her hand, Commander?” she asks, breaking the frozen hush of the cold Frostbacks air.

“Why do you ask?”

“Everyone has their theories. I was just wondering yours.”

“I’ve never really given it much thought.”

“But surely you must have been curious,” she continues, her hand drifting quietly to touch the chipped stone knuckles. “If it was the Maker, how would his words even look on her palm? Would he have shit handwriting, I wonder?”

He huffs a laugh. “Only you of all people would think of such things.”

“Someone has to, right?” She finally turns her head to face him, her eyes tinged with something dimmed and soft. “I’ve never really told anyone this before. But when I was a child, I always thought that the statues had it right. That Andraste had been born with nothing on her hand. And I still do think that.”

“Why is that?”

“I don’t know. I liked to believe that since the world owned enough of her that just once, she could have something for herself. Just for her.”

He considers this with a quiet that seems to settle in his bones. “That must be freeing. If not isolating.”

“Maybe. But you don’t need a bare hand to feel that way.”

She closes her eyes and he can see her fingers fragile and frozen with the cold, the green sheen of her mark coloring the crack in the statue’s open palm. He’s never been close to it before and morbid curiosity wills him to stare at it a little longer than propriety allows. It is rude to gawk at someone’s bare palm without their permission and Cullen is thankful that she hasn’t noticed. Not like it matters anyway. Whatever might have been written in her hand is shrouded by her mark.

Cullen doesn’t know whether to feel disappointed or relieved.

“You seem quiet,” she notes after a spell of silence. “Well, quieter than usual.”

“I actually came here to find you for a reason. I wanted to apologize for what I said. Before you left for Redcliffe.”

She blinks, her face belying her efforts to remember before she shakes her head in realization. “As odd as it is, I’m glad we let that out into the open. It was only a matter of time and I’d rather have it now than in the end.”

“A fight?”

“No. An understanding,” her voice is still humorous but now laced with a heaviness that roots an unsettling feeling in his gut. “I realized something while I was in the future, how little and how big it meant. The differences that we think matter that don’t matter at all.”

He doesn’t respond to that, although his face must speak enough for itself. He doesn’t know her, not really. But he knows that she smiles even when it’s uncomfortable and that she gets angry for others’ sakes. That her mind works faster than her mouth at times and that her jokes are terrible and obnoxious. That she will help a farmer find his druffalo when everything else is turning to shit. That she is the type of woman to come back from the dead, even more alive than when she left.

He doesn’t know her, not really, but he knows that talking about the end doesn’t suit her at all.

“Do you still want to know my theory?” he asks before his nerve can fail him.

“What do you mean?”

“What you asked before. About Andraste’s words.”

She cocks her head, confused, but nods anyway.

“I believe that she did have someone’s words written. But it wouldn’t have mattered and that’s why I never thought much of it.”

“Never?”

“Well, not never,” he starts and stops, feeling that he needs to give equal weight to all his words. “I believe that regardless of what was in her hand, it wouldn’t have mattered as much as who was holding it in the end.”

She seems to take that into serious consideration before coming back with her usual quip. “You’re a secret romantic, aren’t you?”

“I think you’re mistaking me for Cassandra.”

She laughs, a sound so warm that Cullen is struck with a self-conscious realization of how much he enjoys being the cause of it.

“At the very least we do have something in common.”

“What’s that?”

“We’re friends now. It’s official.”

“Fair enough,” he says gruffly, a little embarrassed and pleased. She strikes her hand towards him for a shake. Without a thought, he responds, simultaneously prepared and unprepared for how his hand now feels like living electricity.

And if he holds on for a second longer, it is a mere reaction from the cold and nothing more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If there's anything death has taught him, it's that nothing good comes from seeking the blessing of women bigger than the myths of their own making.

In his experience, he's stood against too much to kneel again.

But he's been consistently wrong about a lot of things to be good at prophesying.

The snow is murder to his kneecaps as he bends his body towards her, a feeble attempt to protect her from the wind. It just seems so little in comparison to everything she had done for them in return. When she'd simply been the prisoner, ebbing and flowing between death and life in those tenuous three days, it had been easy to reconcile the emptiness in his body with the momentous loss of the Conclave. It had been easy to ignore his grief over a stranger even if nothing about her felt like a stranger to him.

But that time was different.

That man of then had not known what exactly it was he could forfeit.

Cullen grasps her into his arms, holds her like he's carrying the entire weight of the world right then and there. Which he might as well be.

_The remaining rifts. This dragon and that demon riding it. Haven destroyed and Maker, what would we do now?_

This is all that is drifting in the air as the straggling crowds part to let Cullen through one of their biggest tents. The worry is everywhere but his sight is only on her. The anchor burns as brightly and greenly as ever but that matters little. All he can see at the end of the world is not the world itself.

Her. Just her.

There are figures entering through the flap of the tent but all he can see is the blue of her lips, the barely noticeable rise and fall of her chest.

 _Keep her warm!_ someone says to his right but he can't for the life of him tell who it is. He himself starts barking orders, but that is a reflex more than anything.

They lay her on a cot and Cullen stays like he can't be anywhere else. The chill is in his gut, ice wrapping tendrils on them both. She is slipping and he can feel threads of her leaving.

He's kneeling again before he even realizes, grasps her hands in his and blows his own breath into them.

He does this until his focus narrows only to her hands. Then to the feeble pulse on her wrist.

_Maker, though the darkness comes upon me, I shall embrace the Light. I shall weather the storm. I shall endure. What you have created, no one can tear asunder..._

The Chant spills out of his mouth like her heartbeat, stifled then easier, shifting in time with the thrumming green sheen of the Anchor like an obscuring stain on the open pad of her palm.

He prays, the time sluicing past and when she wakes, the world could burn again right then and there and he would still not stop his gratitude for her pulse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Distance had seemed to be an appropriate strategy when it concerned her.

It also made it easier to hide his condition. To think she’d stay oblivious forever was admittedly a naïve and intentional oversight on his part.

He feels a little bad in thinking he could keep her in the dark for this long. Their new hideaway in Skyhold certainly helped in those matters when he could easily slip from one darkened corridor to the next without her notice. But fool of him to think he could avoid her and her uncanny ability to hang onto every detail. The day when she’d hear the ugly truth spilling from his mouth would come soon enough.

He wants to shut the door. Hide behind his pretense. Not have her witness his shame in the way his hands shake or in the faint layer of sweat on his forehead.

But if there’s something the Inquisitor does quite well it’s that she doesn’t face away from pain - be it her own or another’s.

“Is it overbearing? I have some poultices with me if it would help,” she says, probably for the fifth time so far in the last hour.

“No. That’s not necessary. I’m alright.”

“Are you certain?”

“Yes.”

“Are you thirsty?”

“No.”

“What about food? I could fetch something from the kitchens.”

His head is throbbing. At a better mood, he’d be appreciative. Right now her concern is a strain on his already tempered head.

“Really, I’m fine,” he says sternly. She stares back at him with her hands on her hips, unimpressed.

“I’ve eaten today. Cassandra made sure of that,” he adds as an afterthought.

“You’re a terrible liar,” she says. “I’m probably worsening what you’re trying to hide.”

He can only blink at that.

“I’m glad Cassandra has been taking care of you,” she adds. Her face is strangely unreadable but he's too busy pressing his nails on his palms to wonder more.

“She has been…helpful,” he says simply. “She's well-qualified to keep an eye on me. And she understands to some extent. I was with her the day the Breach opened. She said she had someone who had been at the Temple, and the pain was similar to a degree. Even now she experiences chronic--”

He snaps his mouth shut, realizing that perhaps he has revealed too much of personal affairs that he didn’t own. The Inquisitor only nods.

“Yes. She’s told me about him,” she gives a little sigh. “I cannot imagine what that pain must feel like.”

That quiets him in a different way. He almost mentions his mother but stops himself. Still; his mouth is a traitorous thing.

"So you’ve never lost…someone like that?”

He can feel the regret already when he sees the slow curl of her smile.

“You mean a soulmate?”

“Yes,” he fumbles, feeling the back of his neck prickle.

“In that case, no,” she says, mirth coloring her voice. "If I can help it, I’ll keep it that way for a blessedly long time.”

She takes his hand (gloved, thank the Maker) and drops a small clothed bag of herbs on it, closing his fingers around it into a fist.

“Those should help,” she says, eyes on him. She has that look on again. The very same that’s becoming more and more sure on her face.

It's an unusual feeling - to be undone. He's been raked to the bone before but in moments he'd rather not remember. But this is different, this kind of breaking. He can feel himself unspooling and her warm eyes aren't helping. But this is such a bad time, and his mind is too occupied with his own personal torment to dare feel anything else.

He swallows the hope down before it can even have a chance to come up.

She stands suddenly, poising herself for the door. His hand twitches despite himself, as sentient as his desire to grab her back and root her to the ground for just a moment.

“I’ll let you be. For now. But, Cullen,” her voice lilting comically to a superior tone, “do try not to hide from me anymore.”

He knows she’s joking but her smile is telling him otherwise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Being her friend is the easiest thing he's ever done.

He invites her to their routine game of chess, lets himself laugh at how bad she is and how even worse her shameless attempts at cheating are. He allows himself to look at her. Truly look at her without the strategic distraction of paperwork or his soldiers. She has freckles on her nose, he notices absently during a long War Table meeting. She'd just gotten back from the Western Approach so he's not entirely surprised. Her smile is different when directed at him in comparison when she smiles at anyone else. Every time she passes him supervising drills and he merely gives her a polite nod, it takes a considerable amount of will to pry his eyes away and not consider the fact that she never smiles like that at anyone else.

Cullen really tries not to think too much of it. It, being a vague notion in his head that he knows will lead only to trouble if he thinks about it for too long. He’s learned to look the other way with a lot of things. Doesn’t bother looking sideways from his post to see her entertaining yet another noble who has more than business in mind.

He knows to walk away. To ignore the peripheral sight of the visiting dignitary kissing her knuckles and to pry his clenched hand that had already been set on the pommel of his sword. Dismiss the obnoxious laughter from the noble as he turns his back, knowing full well that staying longer is enough of a headache as it is. Knows that he shouldn’t linger at the added thought of someone tracing the words on her palm.

Just the idea is enough to make his jaw ache.

He has his inaction and his willful ignorance and that itself is a sort of defense.

He can’t muster the same excuse at night however.

His thoughts are traitors, always latching onto her to whisper the filth of all the dreams he's tried to lock away. Indulging in an innocent fantasy of a different life is one thing of course.

His guilt is another.

The first time he dreams of her, he wakes with sweat and his blankets sticky on his stomach. He can almost forgive himself. He's a grown man with needs. She is a friend and colleague who is a frequent visitor of his time and attention. It could be anybody.

At least, that's what he tells himself.

Because the first time he dreams of her awake, he has no excuse. He is disappointed that his hand had only been reluctant in the beginning. It's become almost a ritual. He sets the pace, always careful to be slow so he can savor first until he's pumping himself up and down with abandon at the thought of lips puckering around him. He only imagines vaguely, hazy pieces of her that could belong to anybody. The hint of her collarbone when she leaves a small part of the top of her shirt unbuttoned because of the sudden heat. Long lashes wet with the dew of early morning. Her lips, the graceful swell of her breasts, her nose, her hair, her eyes, her smile, Maker, oh Maker her smile--

There's self-loathing. But that's part of it. He aches. But that's all of it. He twists, languishes at the hollowness of his pleasure and dissolves with the image of her writhing around him.

The next day at the War Room, when she takes one look at him and worriedly asks if he’s gotten enough sleep, the lie comes easier this time around.

After all, being only her friend is the hardest thing he's ever done in comparison.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But for a time, he makes it work.

Logic tells him that keeping his distance would be the benefit to his own sanity and self-preservation. And every time logic almost has him rounding to its corner, she’s already barging in his office in that casual way of hers with a tray of cakes she’s nabbed from the kitchens and a funny story she’s stolen from Varric's repertoire.

There are moments where it becomes almost impossible to entertain such notions of distance. Moments where he'll catch her making faces at her own reflection in her soup spoon or rubbing the sleep from her eyes late at a meeting or scrunching her nose before laughing or looking so utterly human that make it so unthinkable.

It’s almost easy, even bearable enough that Cullen can forget. Fool himself into thinking that he's not in half-agony with how much he wants her. Perhaps, this is the extent of how far her words will go for him. Perhaps, he was meant to be this. Her friend. As good of a reality as any other fact in this universe.

Never mind that experience has taught him that she will never make anything simple.

 

 

 

 

 

 

One day, she proves him right.

"Walk the battlements with me?" she offers.

And what could he do but say yes?

 

 

 

 

 

 

“There’s been talk about you, you know.”

It's so typical of their conversations, Cullen doesn't foresee her intentions when she starts. Really, he's going soft.

“More Orlesian prattle, I presume?” he says dryly, not quite paying attention as he regards his men practicing drills down below. “Are they ever going to tire of the rumor that you only keep me around because of my looks?”

“Oh, so you’re aware?”

At his glower, she laughs. “As if they’re not completely wrong.”

He rolls his eyes good-naturedly. “Ha, ha.”

“Sorry to disappoint you but no, it isn't that. There’s been some interesting new ones, I think. Some of your scorned admirers have been spreading ill-fated rumors about you it would seem.”

“What are they saying about me this time?”

“One of the frequents at the entrance of the Main Hall says that you sleep with your armor. Another says that you secretly hide a harem inside your office, which is why you never leave it. And one that says you stole the fur of your pauldrons from the rug of some Arl,” she lists more and he tries not to snort too much at each one. “Also that you are…”

She hesitates, a strange enough occurrence that he turns his eyes back to her.

“What is it?”

“They say you are...suffering from what they call _la maladie du non écrite_.”

“What in Andraste’s name is that?”

“It is an idiom,” she says reluctantly, pausing a little when he doesn’t deter his gaze. “It means ‘sickness of the unwritten’.”

There’s an awful, familiar weight starting to layer in his stomach and he has to give himself some credit when his only response is to arch an unassuming eyebrow.

She continues, “It is an Orlesian phrase that describes people who do not have their words on someone else’s hand. That they are _sans âme soeur_. Without a soulmate, or…unwritten, as they say.”

“Oh.”

“Your slanderers are scorned, as I said. Orlesians have sharper tongues when they don’t get their way.”

“Right.” He drags his attention back to his soldiers, noting that one of them (Branwell, his mind helpfully supplies) is slouching far too often for his liking.

“Of course…there were some other nobles who thought differently,” she continues roughly after a spell of silence, as if it took added effort to push each word out. “Some loyal admirers still think the others are too rash to discount the possibility. And that even if on the chance such a person didn’t exist, they believe you wouldn’t even need someone like that. Not if—Not if there was already someone—er, people who cared for you in such a way.”

It is only in his peripheral but she is outwardly blushing and Maker help him, anticipation is blooming again in his chest, mixing sweetness with the pit of dread in his stomach. Both growing far too big for his attempts to squash them.

He looks sideways at her again. Tries not to make himself too obvious.

“Is that so?”

“Yes. Strange, don’t you think?” she chuckles, breathless. “Even stranger still when one of them roped me of all people into the discussion and started suggesting such things…”

She fiddles with a chipped crack on the stone of the battlements, inspecting it aimlessly with her nails. Cullen wishes she would at least look at him.

“And what were they?”

Her eyes lift to meet his hesitantly.

“They are all assuming, as I said. The Anchor hides my words and you are wordless. And so of course, it would be a perfect coincidence if yours were just merely hiding in plain sight."

There is silence and then --

"I daresay they think you are fated for me."

Cullen swallows a breath. “And what did you…think of that? Do you believe in what they said?”

“I don’t know if I believe them,” she says finally and the beginnings of rejection are a sharp, icy claw of reality clamping on his bones. Maker help him, his heart is at his throat and he’s insisted before that he’d survive being only her friend but she could ruin him right now with a word and he’d have no choice but to let her.

She looks up at him and seems to register his distress when she chooses her words firmly and deliberately.

“But I hope they’re right about you.”

For a woman who can change the world with a few simple words, it's not the most powerful thing she’s said.

But he feels the breath knocked out of him regardless.

Something stirs in his head, a resurgence of memory fluttering back too much for the stutters of his heart to keep constrained. Without meaning to, his eyes fall to her left hand, ungloved and bare. As if in answer, she offers her palm willfully to him and the green mark shines and winks against the glare of the sun. He’s never seen it this close or this bright. Because now he can see at the edge of it, a tail end of a sentence. A faint curl of a _y_ , the near perfect curve of an _o_ and a _u_. A slanted, efficient print by a hand that can only be as neat as his. Barely there and largely obscured by the rift in her palm.

But his.

He opens his mouth.

Of all times, it would be just like him to forget something he’s memorized in his sleep. He turns his gaze to her, holds it for a second longer. She smiles, nose scrunching and utterly, utterly beautiful, and he breaks.

The Void take him.

He catches her by surprise, which funnily enough, with the amount of time he’s spent over-thinking how she tastes, feels like the easiest damn thing he’s ever done in his life.

His shaky fingers find themselves at the sides of her face, the pulse on his wrist running his breath to a ragged stammer. It takes him a hazy second to register her fingers clutching at his elbow almost desperately, the only part of himself within reach that’s not hindered with metal. His armor is annoyingly in the way and he doesn't want to crush her too hard against the stone, but all he wants at this moment is to print himself on her.

To feel her skin with his. To taste her, sweet and slow, with a roll of his tongue, his teeth. Steal her until she's embedded in his lungs, his heart. She moans into his mouth and it sends a jolt straight to his abdomen.

 _Mine_ , he breathes. _No_ , ours.

His hands drift (soft, he thinks headily), not anticipating her to be ticklish at her sides of all places.

Absurdly, she giggles. Smiles even more against his mouth.

 _Oh, Maker_ , he thinks as he leans his forehead against hers, eyes dragging themselves open. _Maker, Maker…_

Her name. It had always been her name that he said aloud.

“What was that?” he murmurs to her lips – not touching, not quite, but just making sure. "What was that again?"

“I hope they’re right about you,” she confesses to his lips in return.

He leans back a little, just far enough so he can see her eyes. See the full brim of her mouth deepen into a smile he’d know in death as well as the words on his palm.

So he can watch her when he finally finds them at the right time.

“You’re not the only one hoping that.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to the roommate for the french translation lol


End file.
